Volume 5 Issue 2 - Nurse Patricia Peat

Originally published in Issue 2 2006 icon

Patricia Peat is a registered nurse. Following years of experience in oncology, combined with research into natural approaches to cancer she now runs Cancer Options.

Cancer Options is a specialised team of practitioners who provide individual consultancy and coaching into treatment and making decisions for all approaches to cancer.

Details of their services are available at www.canceroptions.co.uk or by calling 0845 009 2041.

Can you tell me anything both retinoblastoma, I understand it is hereditary, but there is no history of it in my family so how can it occur? Is there any chance of it being cured and will it affect other members of my family?

Retinoblastoma is a cancer, which develops in the cells of the retina, the light sensitive lining of the eye.

It actually occurs in two forms: a genetic, inheritable variant and a non-genetic, non-inheritable form.

Approximately 45% of children with retinoblastoma have the inheritable or genetic form of the disease. When there is no previous family history of retinoblastoma, the disease is called sporadic.

There are lots of different ways of treating it: If it occurs on one eye they often remove the affected eye, if not the options are cryotherapy (freezing of the tumour), chemotherapy, radiotherapy, laser treatment, and surgery.

The choice of treatment offered varies according to the individual case, there are often ongoing effects form treatment but more than nine out of ten children can be cured, and it has one of the best cure rates of all the cancers which develop in children.

Genetic counselling will be offered, the gene, which causes this, is called the RB1 gene and the family can be screened to find any other carriers.

I have heard of oxygen drops in water, which can help cure you of cancer, is that true?

This is a very contentious issue; there are an increasing amount of products available that purport to increase the levels of oxygen in the blood. To put this into some sort of perspective, there is little doubt that increasing the oxygen in the body is a good thing on all sorts of levels. Most integrative clinics offer ozone therapy as part of a wider programme of treatment. Blood is taken, treated with ozone and injected back into the body, none of the clinics claim this is terribly effective on it’s own, but does help other approaches work better.

At the Oasis of Hope hospital in Mexico, they have use an extracorporeal loop to ozonate all of the patient’s blood. This is a bit like a heart bypass machine to oxygenate all the blood. They claim this increases the efficiency of their other treatments and brings about results much faster.

I have spoken to Professor Bocci in Italy who was the inventor of the extracorporeal loop system, he treats people in Italy with this. His realistic appraisal is, for this intensive treatment to have any real effect against cancer, he would not consider treating someone for less than six months of continuous therapy.

When one considers the balanced opinions of the doctors who are using, more intensive oxygen treatments, I find it hard to view the claims made by manufacturers of oxygen waters as anything other than grossly inflated. Regular exercise, good brisk walks in fresh air and taking up Qi Gong would probably be much more beneficial.

My Mother has been recently diagnosed with cancer and they say they cannot find the primary, surely by taking a biopsy (which they have done) they can tell where it is from?

Unfortunately this is not always the case. When a biopsy is taken and put under the microscope it will generally resemble the cells from the organ or tissue from where it has come. This is called differentiation and is to do with how cells change from being normal to becoming malignant. When cells go through early changes (the sort of change that is picked up on cervical smears) they strongly resemble the other cells in that area.

As time goes on, and the evolution of the cells takes place, they change in both what they do, and how they look, and this is called differentiation. Well- differentiated cells tell us that either the cellular change is in its early stages, and/or the cancer is not very aggressive and this process goes through moderately differentiated to poorly differentiated. Unfortunately in your Mum’s case the cells have changed so much they bear no resemblance at all to normal cells and it is impossible to tell where they come from.

Once treatment commences, the doctors might be able to pick up other clues as to where they originate from and plan accordingly.